An Unkind Frenchman Says That Her
Limitations Must Always Keep
Her in a Secondary Role.
We have often been told by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman that woman, as a
type, ranks higher in almost every respect than man; and there are many
people of both sexes who agree with her. Nevertheless, the champions of
feminine superiority may find it hard work to shout down the glorifiers of
masculine achievement.
Here is a Frenchman, Georges Pellisier, a literary critic, who argues that
woman cannot write great literature, because she is intellectually as well
as physically inferior to man. He assigns to her the secondary literary
role of acting as mistress of the literary salon--a position which, he
thinks, has a valuable influence. He expresses his views as follows, in
_La Revue_ (Paris), the translation being that of the _Literary Digest_:
Philosophy, criticism, and history are beyond her mental
scope, and I know of none who has made a lasting impression
in these domains. Philosophy requires a force of abstraction
and a power of application rarely possessed by women, the
power of reflection being, with them, as one of the greatest
of them has admitted, "rather a happy accident than a
peculiar or permanent attribute." Naturally impulsive, they
fail to follow out the logic of their ideas.... In the
domain of criticism woman is too much the slave of first
impressions, or preconceived notions, which must be
admitted, however, to be generally very vivid and often very
just.
Her personal preferences, nevertheless, obscure her views
and misguide her opinions, while she lacks almost wholly the
faculty of weighing her judgments.... A proper study or
understanding of history is impossible without the
philosophic and the critical faculties, and, above all, a
disinterested love of truth. Woman colors events according
as passion or sentiment sways her. The real historian must
totally efface both himself and his bias; and this, woman,
of her nature, is incapable of doing....
There remain to her the drama, poetry, and the novel. In
dramatic art, no woman has produced anything of lasting
note, the reason being that the dramatist must, perforce, be
without egotism and be capable of detaching the Ego from the
action of the play--a thing impossible in woman.
In poetry this critic allows to woman but "the shadow of a name"; for few
women, he argues, have written verse that endured. "The principal defect
she evinces in poetry," he says, "is a lack of artistic execution."
Woman's best work, he thinks, has been done in romance, though he refuses
to class any woman with the master-novelists. Even this small credit he
awards grudgingly and carpingly. He cannot ignore success, but he tries to
belittle it.
Apart from the fact that they may indulge in solecism and
anachronism without being severely called to task by the
critics, their composition is faulty. Even Georges Sand was
not above suspicion. There is palpable in their novels an
incoherent notion of logical plot, while their imagination
is subjected to no salutary discipline. Their work lacks
vigor, and in its weakness, not an unattractive quality in
woman herself, there is something commonplace that is not
redeemed by elegance. Above all, woman's temperament recoils
from a depiction of the stern reality of life.... She has no
sense of proportion, and for her the beautiful and the
pretty are interchangeable terms.